This year's May Day holiday saw a continued boom in the national cultural and tourism market, with tourism performing arts becoming a significant growth driver for holiday consumption. Over 400 large and medium-sized tourism performing arts projects were staged across the country, with immersive dramas, live-action performances, and regional cultural exhibitions being particularly favored. The trend of "sightseeing by day, watching performances by night" has become a new holiday norm, injecting strong vitality into the night-time economy and the integration of culture and tourism.
However, driven by a superficial emphasis on traffic, some projects have fallen into developmental pitfalls: they chase short-term popularity through excessive marketing and hype, while neglecting content refinement, cultural exploration, and artistic craftsmanship. Some projects are mere copies, suffering from severe homogenization that dilutes regional cultural characteristics. Others over-rely on sound, light, and visual effects, using dazzling spectacles to mask hollow narratives, lacking complete storytelling and emotional resonance. Some even resort to exaggerated performances for attention, failing to serve the purpose of cultural heritage and aesthetic cultivation. This approach of prioritizing the trivial over the fundamental may garner temporary attention but struggles to build lasting vitality, ultimately becoming market froth.
Today, tourists' tastes and demands are becoming increasingly discerning. Performances lacking cultural depth, artistic quality, and emotional warmth, even if heavily marketed, often result in one-time consumption, failing to build word-of-mouth or repeat patronage. Industry statistics indicate that the tourism performing arts sector is undergoing a deep adjustment, with over 30% of projects in the past three years falling into suspension or operational losses. Small and medium-sized projects are being phased out more quickly due to homogenization and lack of innovation. Projects hastily launched with a focus on promotion over creation quickly face operational difficulties once the hype fades, leading to resource wastage and damaging the industry's overall reputation.
The root cause is clear: popularity is superficial, while quality is foundational. Projects lacking a foundation of quality cannot sustain their popularity. Many tourism performing arts initiatives are now shifting from scale expansion to quality and efficiency improvement. During this May Day holiday, projects with solid content, refined production, and deep cultural heritage were clearly more favored by the market. These projects do not rely on excessive marketing; instead, they win hearts through their cultural essence, artistic presentation, and audience experience, achieving a win-win in both reputation and economic returns.
Tourism performing arts is not only a new format in cultural tourism consumption but also an important vehicle for cultural transmission and inheritance. Genuine industry vitality has never stemmed from marketing hype but from the long-term accumulation of quality content, cultural substance, and artistic dedication. For the industry, abandoning a short-sighted, traffic-driven mindset and returning to the essence of artistic creation and cultural heritage is the only path to sustainable development.
On one hand, creators must delve deeply into regional cultural connotations, rejecting simple symbol-stacking and model replication. They should base their work on local history, folklore, and humanistic characteristics to develop unique, differentiated productions that balance artistry, entertainment, and cultural value, thereby enhancing overall quality. On the other hand, operators must shift their approach, moving away from traffic anxiety, balancing investment in marketing and creation, and eschewing vulgar hype and excessive promotion. They should rely on quality content for long-term impact.
Simultaneously, the industry needs to strengthen regulation and guidance, encouraging the creation of high-quality works and phasing out shoddy productions. Furthermore, building quality does not necessarily require exorbitant capital investment. High expenditure does not equate to quality; blindly piling on time and resources leads only to redundancy and strain, which can undermine a sense of sophistication. True quality comes from restraint and proportion, with the key lying in the efficiency of investment. The focus should be on core leverage points, concentrating resources on areas critical to value creation, while decisively simplifying elsewhere. Upholding fundamental standards and applying precise effort can achieve a relaxed, self-consistent, and sophisticated quality with limited investment.
Traffic may be easy to gain, but quality is hard to attain. By adhering to artistic integrity, deepening content quality, and using culture as the soul and quality as the backbone, the industry can create fine works that withstand market scrutiny and gain audience recognition. This will allow tourism performing arts to truly become a shining example of cultural and tourism integration, unifying artistic, cultural, and market value, and promoting the industry's steady, long-term, and prosperous development.
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